Steven Junil Park, Gina Russell, Christine Brimer, Georgina May Young, Sione Tuívailala Monū

May 2025 – February 2026
Te Ara Ātea

Textiles and cloth are more than just functional materials we use to cover and clothe. Woven into them are expressions of culture and belonging. The way we make, use, and share them reflects what we value and what we hold close.

At Te Ara Ātea, the pavement encircling the building represents a whāriki — a woven mat. This whāriki marks Te Ara Ātea as a significant place in our community and connects it to the whenua it sits on. Using this reference to a whāriki as a starting point, Close-knit explores how textiles weave together stories of connection and community.

Steven Junil Park 박준일 (Korean), Gina Russell (Ngāpuhi), Christine Brimer (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Rongomaiwahine, Scotland, England) and Georgina May Young (Te Ūpokorehe, Te Whakatōhea, Irish)
The Soil Addresses Us As One, 2025

Mixed-media installation
Courtesy of the artists

“It’s about having a relationship with your materials.” — Gina Russell

The Soil Addresses Us As One is a project initiated by artist Steven Junil Park and farmer Gina Russell to connect textile artists with the linen and natural dye plants that Gina grows in Waikirikiri Selwyn. Working as Growing Textiles, Gina’s intention is to organically farm textile plants on a scale that can support makers in Aotearoa New Zealand to use locally grown plant fibre and dye.

Steven, with his relationships in the craft community, invited fellow textile artists Christine Brimer and Georgina May Young to contribute new artwork to The Soil Addresses Us As One with the condition that they incorporate Gina’s mahi into their artwork.

In The Soil Addresses Us As One, the installation retells the story of textiles not as a commodity to be consumed, but as shared human phenomenon. Here textiles are portrayed as a force that brings people together and helps us understand who we are, where we have come from, and where we can go.

Together, the group used materials from Gina’s farm to examine what goes into creating textiles, telling the story right from the beginning: the plants, soil, sun, rain, and processes from which our clothing is made. The artworks speak to these materials as more than just beautiful resources to use in craft, but as the very fibres that connect us to each other. As they examine the physical origins and characteristics of organically grown textiles and natural dyes, they also explore the non-physical elements of what our textiles can mean: their emotional, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions.

Christine Brimer (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Rongomaiwahine, Scotland, England)
The Ways of Water, 2025

Unbleached and undyed GOTS certified European linen, linen stalks, indigo, onion skin, black bean, avocado pit, iron modifier, galvanised steel rod, powder coated steel.
Courtesy of the artist

Steven Junil Park invited weaver Christine Brimer to contribute an artwork to The Soil Addresses Us As One using materials from Gina Russell’s linen flax and indigo harvest.

The Ways of Water is an artwork made from three loom woven panels and a length of indigo dyed linen thread. It is part of Christine’s ongoing series, Field Works, which explores the potential of regenerative farming practices. The arrangement of The Ways of Water represents the healthy cycle of water through Gina’s farming of linen flax in Waikirikiri Selwyn.

The upright panel, named 2 Faces of Rain, refers to the rainfall which was the sole water source for Gina’s 2025 linen crop. The middle panel titled, Linen — 100 Days, is a timelapse documenting 100 days of growing linen. It begins with sowing the linen flax, its growth, the plant’s blue flowers, and going to seed before harvest. The pile underneath depicts the tap roots of the linen flax improving soil health. The final panel, Dew, represents dew retting, a traditional process of laying the harvested linen plants on an open field for the dew to settle on the stalks. Over weeks, dew aids microbes in separating the linen fibre from other plant matter for easier extraction.

Below these woven panels is linen thread dyed with pigment from Gina’s indigo crop. It represents the aquifers that flow beneath Selwyn, reminding us that what we do on this whenua will eventually flow through our waterways too.

Gina Russell (Ngāpuhi)
Growing Textiles, 2025

Linen brake, linen flax, linen twine
Courtesy of the artist

Gina Russell is the founder of Growing Textiles, a regenerative textile farming project in Selwyn. Still in its exploratory phase, the project explores the cultivation of organic linen, Japanese indigo and other dye plants. Her goal is to create a textile system that provides textile makers with locally grown materials.

Gina and Steven Junil Park met at the beginning of 2024, during Gina’s first harvest of linen and Japanese indigo. They share the belief that textiles weave our stories into the past, give context to our present, and nurture hope for the future. For The Soil Addresses Us As One, Gina and Steven invited artists Georgina May Young and Christine Brimer to produce work using the materials that Gina has grown, responding to the materials and considering the ways they can create connection.

Here, we see Gina’s linen brake in the process of turning the flax plant into fibre. By connecting the cultivation of flax to the linen we are familiar with as a fabric, Gina highlights the origins of the materials used in textile crafts. Growing Textiles encourages makers and consumers to reflect on where their resources come from, how they’re used and where they go when their lifecycle ends.

Georgina May Young (Te Ūpokorehe, Te Whakatōhea, Irish)
Ara Manawa, 2025

Muka, indigo, coreopsis, uku, mineral watercolour, gum arabic, houhere, linen, cotton
Courtesy of the artist

Steven Junil Park invited Ōtepoti Dunedin artist Georgina May Young to contribute an artwork to The Soil Addresses Us As One, using natural dye plants from Gina Russell’s 2025 harvest.

Central to Georgina’s textile art practice is the use of taonga materials, including native plants and whenua pigments. In Ara Manawa, she uses two taonga materials used in customary raranga weaving; muka (harakeke flax fibre) and houhere (lacebark). The embroidered nohoanga (chair) and hue (gourd) are stitched with muka, and the trim at the bottom of the work is made with houhere. To colour these materials, Georgina used Gina’s natural dye plants. The blue colour comes from Japanese indigo pigment and yellow is from coreopsis flowers.

In using these non-traditional dyes to colour native plant fibre, Georgina sees them bringing their own whakapapa (genealogy) to sit with the taonga materials. Georgina believes their whakapapa includes Gina’s role in growing them, saying her ‘hard mahi, dedication, and hope [are] embedded in wild, joyful colour.’

The embroidered and painted elements represent symbols that Georgina reflected on when approaching this project and the materials used. A kaitiaki figure speaks to the care of those who garden, the noho taniwha (taniwha teeth) pattern referencing whakapapa and the transmission of knowledge, the tānekaha (celery pine) plant embroidered to reference a native dye plant.

The reverse of the work is purposely displayed. Georgina shows us the often-hidden underside of her embroidery, encouraging us to appreciate the unseen systems that sustain the connections between us and the environment.

Steven Junil Park 박준일 (Korean)
The Soil Addresses Us As One, 2024–2025

Indigo stalk vases, linen flax, dried indigo leaves, indigo leaf beads, hand embroidered vintage gloves, linseeds
Courtesy of the artist

The objects on display made by Steven Junil Park are the product of his experimentation with the materials from Gina Russell’s harvest. They show the respect he has for the care, resources and whenua that has allowed these plants to grow.

The dyeing process used on these gloves blends Gina’s fresh Japanese indigo leaves with ice-cold water to extract a light blue colour. Inspired by the plant that dyed the gloves, Steven embroidered the flowering indigo plant on the gloves, with indigo seeds embroidered in the palms.

When Steven first experimented with extracting pigment from the Japanese indigo, the ‘waste products’ of the process were at odds with Steven’s appreciation of these plants as precious. To honour the whole plant and the value of its ‘waste’, Steven mixed the indigo leaf pulp with flour to make beads and used the indigo stalks to create functional baskets. Dried indigo leaves and Gina’s dried linen stalks fill the baskets. Sitting on the shelf under the gloves is a hand carved bowl containing the linseed from this linen flax.

In these works, the whole plant and their products are cherished and respected as are the nutrients from the soil and Gina’s effort and energy to nurture them.

The video artwork, Stories from the Soil, shows these crops growing in Gina’s Lincoln farm and process videos of Steven using fresh indigo dye and processing linen to make twine.

Sione Tuívailala Monū (Aotearoa, Australia, Tonga)
Threads Across the Sky, 2025

Plastic beads, foam board, glitter board, paper
Courtesy of the artist

Here in Waikirikiri Selwyn, we’re familiar with dramatic clouds. In Threads Across the Sky by Sione Tuívailala Monū, colourful clouds and their vibrant raindrops float through Te Ara Ātea. They fill the atrium space above our Community Lounge, stretching up to the first-floor mezzanine and across to our Young Adult Collection.

Clouds are a frequent symbol in Sione’s artwork. This formation was made with the cycle of water in mind. In our district, braided rivers are fed by the rain and snow that falls on our mountains. When making this artwork for Te Ara Ātea, Sione focused on the way in which water moves across this whenua, with the blue and red clouds in the centre of the group as an acknowledgement of our waterways.

Sione’s beading practice is born from the customary crafting practices of the Tongan diaspora, experienced while growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. They watched women in their family make customary kafa (waist adornment), adding non-traditional colourful beads to create highly intricate patterns, as well as floral shapes that reference tropical flowers native to Tonga.

This innovation and adoption of a new material in Tongan craft is the foundation for Sione’s joyful use of beading in Threads Across the Sky, brightening Te Ara Ātea as they shimmer and sparkle in the sun.

Vivienne Mountfort and Riki Manuel (Ngāti Porou)
Mango Pare (Hammerhead Shark Design), 1995

Handspun wool, tōtara wood, pāua shell, plywood
Courtesy of Lincoln University Art Collection

Mango Pare (Hammerhead Shark Design) was made by renowned textile artist Vivienne Mountfort (1918–2004) in collaboration with master carver Riki Manuel. Vivienne’s watery off-loom weaving forms the background for a makōpare — a hammerhead shark — carved from tōtara wood.

Their partnership began in 1986, featuring Riki’s carvings of significant figures and symbols from te ao Māori (the Māori world), mounted on Vivienne’s weaving. A traditional kōwhaiwhai pattern, the makōpare design is used to represent strength, persistence, and resilience. This is echoed in a whakataukī (proverb) from Riki’s iwi, Ngāti Porou: ‘Kia mate mangōpare, kei mate wheke’ — ‘Don’t die like an octopus, die like a hammerhead shark,’ encouraging one to act with shark-like tenacity.

Through her textiles, Vivienne explored her relationship with te ao Māori as a Pākehā person. This was addressed in her 1986 work, Te Whakakotahi o te Maoritanga me te Pakehatanga, which at the time was translated as ‘The unifying or coming together of the Māori culture and the culture of the white settlers.’ Considering her incorporation of toi Māori (Māori art) within her practice, art historian Jonathan Mane Wheoki observed that her practice was ‘enriched by the acceptance of difference and the commerce of ideas’.

Steven Junil Park 박준일 (Korean)
Stories from the Soil, 2025

Seven-channel digital video
Courtesy of the artist

“I wanted to tell the story of how textiles and dyes come about — how they are not just their end product, but how they can be a rich field of connections, of people, of hands, and stories.” — Steven Junil Park

In Stories from the Soil artist Steven Junil Park documents the 2024/2025 summer season at Gina Russell’s farm in Waikirikiri Selwyn, where she grows organic linen flax and natural dye plants for her project, Growing Textiles. Materials from Gina’s crop are used in the artworks displayed in The Soil Addresses Us As One.

The two largest videos, on either side of the elevators at Te Ara Ātea, follow the process of growing and harvesting linen flax (left) and natural dye plants (right). At both entrances to Te Ara Ātea, smaller process videos show Steven making twine from Gina’s linen and using her fresh Japanese indigo harvest to dye fabric. This video also shows Steven repurposing the indigo leaf pulp — a ‘waste’ product of the dyeing process — into the handmade beads which are upstairs in our Toi Cases.

Steven explains, “I wanted to show the textures of this story to the public, who likely have only seen clothing as a final product — which is how I grew up.” By bringing this sun-drenched summer footage into Te Ara Ātea, Steven invites us to connect with how textiles are grown and manufactured in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the stories they tell about this place.

Alix Ashworth (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha)
Make the Net, Feed the Children, 2025

Mixed-media installation
Courtesy of the artist

“When I was asked to create a piece for Te Ara Ātea I immediately thought of Te Waihora and growing up living in Motukarara on the edge of the lake… Reflecting on how myself and my tīpuna interacted with the lake and the surrounding areas.” – Alix Ashworth

Make the Net, Feed the Children by Kāi Tahu artist Alix Ashworth celebrates Te Waihora Lake Ellesmere. Referencing both Māori and Pākehā textile practices —raraka and quilting — Alix’s varied making practice brings Te Waihora and its landscape into Te Ara Ātea.

Woven through the pieces are the blues and greys of the water and silt of the lake–lagoon, the red kōkōwai, and the yellow of the pīkao found on the Kaitorete Spit, a taoka material used in weaving, which dries to a yellow gold. Pīkao is notably used in tukutuku, the patterns of which are referenced in Alix’s pastel drawings.

Te Waihora is such a significant mahika kai for Kāi Tahu that its original name was Te Kete-Ika-a-Rākaihautū (The Fish Basket of Rākaihautū). Acknowledging its bounty, Alix uses the diamond shape to reference the pātiki found in abundance at Te Waihora. The space between the pieces forms the silhouette of the woven nets used to catch fish at Te Waihora.